In the current brutal war of words between the active and passive 3D camps, one of the strongest arguments put forward by passive supporters is that active shutter glasses are much more cumbersome, heavy, fiddly (because you have to recharge them) and expensive than passive ones.

Inevitably Samsung is mighty keen to try and quash this criticism of its beloved active 3D technology. So it’s become the first brand to produce a pair of ‘designer’ active shutter 3D glasses, the SSG-3700CRs, created in conjunction with Austrian design company Silhouette.

What’s more, as if paranoid that these goggles alone might not be ‘sexy’ enough, Samsung has also designed a rather stylish wireless recharging post to keep its groovy new glasses company.

This all sounds gorgeously gadgety to us. So we’ve wasted absolutely no time getting our hands on a pair of the glasses and the charging post to see if they’re as hot in the flesh as they sound on paper.

Starting with the glasses, they genuinely are a revelation in terms of weight and bulk. At just 28g they feel little if any heavier than typical passive glasses thanks to the remarkably slender head band and minimal lens frame. Even better, they still feel balanced, thanks to the careful addition of little weights at the rear end of each side of the head band.

These chunky terminations have a further practical value too, in that one of them carries both a manual power over-ride button (the glasses normally switch on and off automatically) and a USB input for people who don’t want to cough up for the wireless recharging post.